There exists an infrastructure for petrochemical processing throughout the world. This infrastructure is deployed on virtually every continent, addresses wide ranging industries, and employs a wide variety of different implementations of similar or widely differing technologies.
As a major constituent to this infrastructure, the gas industry itself involves multiple components from exploration, recovery, processing and conversion technologies in transforming natural gas into useful end products. In the United States alone, the gas industry involves hundreds to thousands of processing and fractionation facilities. These facilities typically include all the requisite process equipment for processing and separating natural gas into its constituent and valued components, as well as the requisite gas delivery infrastructure and storage and distribution infrastructure for a wide range of different products, including liquid products.
Further processing, conversion and/or commercialization of these products may involve still additional infrastructure. For example, conversion of ethane from gas to higher value chemicals, e.g., olefins, involves substantial infrastructure in the form of steam crackers, and their associated infrastructure. Similarly, in other geographies, olefin production relies upon the conversion of petroleum refining by-products, or naphtha, through alternative cracking operations to produce ethylene and other olefins.
As will be appreciated, the capital costs associated with each of the facility types described above can run from tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars each. Additionally, there are inputs and outputs, of these facilities, in terms of both energy and materials, which have additional costs associated with them, both financial and otherwise that could be further optimized in terms of cost and efficiency. Further, because different facilities tend to be optimized for the particularities (e.g., products, processing conditions) of the market in which they exist, they tend to be operated in an inflexible manner, in some cases without the flexibility or option to optimize for their given market, e.g., a particular oil or gas environment.